The overarching objective of this proposal is to support informed agro climate decision-making by local and national stakeholders in East Africa and Southern Africa. We propose to achieve this objective by addressing needs of the SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa hub (Regional Center for Mapping and Resource Development (RCMRD) related to the topics of “Food Security” and “Weather and Climate”. These needs include: improved early warning and agricultural yield assessments, data sets supporting the regions’ forthcoming crop insurance partnerships, and climate scenarios at seasonal and longer time scales to serve development and hydropower planning. We propose to enhance the RCMRD’s climate services focusing on those topics by (i) improving the access of the RCMRD to NASA and FEWS NET datasets (earth observations, models, and forecasts) and web-services while (ii) expanding the RCMRD’s training capacity and ability to better (a) prepare and train their partner institutions (such as the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center (ICPAC) and the SADC Climate Services Centre (CSC), and the meteorological agencies) and (b) serve local and national stakeholders in their decision-making needs. The primary focus of this project is to increase access to and use of NASA’s Earth observations and modeling datasets (“NASA products”), as well as the datasets/tools – developed through funding from USAID, NASA and USGS (“FEWS NET products”) – for supporting agricultural yield, crop insurance and climate adaptation related decision making processes. The NASA products that we propose to use are: Downscaled and bias corrected NMME seasonal forecasts (supported by SERVIR), FLDAS, Climate Serve, Giovanni and the NEX. The FEWS Net products include CHIRPS and CHIRTS, SPEI, EWX and GeoServe. Working closely with RCMRD and stakeholders, Year-1 activities will include (i) aligning the planned activities (for the rest of the project period) to best meet the needs of the stakeholders, (ii) identifying two-to-three target applications involving food security, crop insurance and/or hydropower applications. In Year-2 we will prepare training modules based on these case studies and analyses and conduct phase-1 training at the hub and the partners’ agencies. During this training phase we will follow an ‘empower the trainers’ capacity building model (building on the successful PREPARED model), working with RCMRD, ICPAC, and the CSC to lead trainings for national meteorological agency scientists. These training activities will leverage and augment existing planned training work that will be supported by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). In Year-2 we will also develop GeoServe, software which will help us bridge the gap between NASA and FEWS NET products and their direct use in agro climate decision-making processes in this region. Our Year-3 primary task will be to extend training to other regional partners and interested stakeholders, while also transitioning GeoServe to RCMRD. This proposal directly targets the NASA Applied Sciences’ objective of improving decision makers’ and resource managers’ access and application of Earth observations. The proposed activities incorporate all three SERVIR approaches: (1) building the capacity of analysts and decision makers to use Earth observations, (2) improving access to data, and (3) providing user-tailored data, products, and tools to inform development decisions. This proposal will empower the Nairobi hub and strengthen their current resources and access to climate and remote sensing datasets. Through this enhanced capacity the hub will be better able to serve the regional/national stakeholders/clients and hence “improve environmental management and resilience to climate change by strengthening the capacity of governments to integrate Earth observation information and geospatial technologies into development decision-making”, which is the primary goal of SERVIR.